NBC News is reporting that McCain had an extramarital affair with a Washington lobbyist--information from a New York Times report coming out tomorrow.

Can you hear that sound? It's the sound of the evangelicals and right-wingers running for the hills .

I seriously doubt NBC News is reporting that. If you look at the NYT article, now online, it doesn't say that. It says that some aides were concerned that his relationship with the lobbyist was inappropriate. It contains no evidence of an affair, and only denials of any affair from the principals. It appears to me to be a rather sleazy attempt to sex up a story with some legitimate questions about McCain (like the Keating Five scandal).

I don't care for McCain as a politician, but this is scummy. Unless the NYT is holding something back, there's no there there.

Unless more comes out (which certainly might happen,) it seems like a non-story to me. I haven't seen anything saying that McCain asked the Times to delay to story. It seems many people knew about the Times' investigation for a while anyway.

One of McCain's senior advisers, Charlie Black, told CNN that the campaign first learned in October the paper was working on a story about McCain's relationship with Iseman. By Thanksgiving, he said, there were "rumors all over town" that the Times was interviewing people.

Black said McCain's campaign and Senate staff spent "countless hours" providing information and documentation to the paper. He said that the information provided to the paper disputes suggestions McCain tried to use his influence to help Iseman's clients.

The fact that Times reporters were working on the story became an open secret among some circles in recent months. In fact, The New Republic magazine started working on its own story on whether the newspaper would publish its findings, Frank Foer, an editor with the magazine, told CNN.

The drudge report does confirm that the McCain campaign fought against releasing the story. Not surprising I guess. We'll have to see what other details surface. This could really hurt his campaign if there is more to it.

Early in Senator John McCains first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a clients corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself  instructing staff members to block the womans access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity....

Mr. McCains confidence in his ability to distinguish personal friendships from compromising connections was at the center of questions advisers raised about Ms. Iseman.

The lobbyist, a partner at the firm Alcalde & Fay, represented telecommunications companies for whom Mr. McCains commerce committee was pivotal. Her clients contributed tens of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.

Mr. Black said Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman were friends and nothing more. But in 1999 she began showing up so frequently in his offices and at campaign events that staff members took notice. One recalled asking, Why is she always around?

That February, Mr. McCain and Ms. Iseman attended a small fund-raising dinner with several clients at the Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive and then flew back to Washington along with a campaign aide on the corporate jet of one of her clients, Paxson Communications. By then, according to two former McCain associates, some of the senators advisers had grown so concerned that the relationship had become romantic that they took steps to intervene.

A former campaign adviser described being instructed to keep Ms. Iseman away from the senator at public events, while a Senate aide recalled plans to limit Ms. Isemans access to his offices.

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after a discussion among the campaign leadership about her.

This is pretty good stuff, especially when you add it on top of McCain's recent fundraising improprieties. And likewise, McCain is now puling about public funding due to his inability to raise any contributions. He's DOA with his own party.

I'd be interested to know if this means Huckabee is getting the nomination. Looks like Mittens should have stayed the course.

Yeah... I'm one of Bill's biggest fans, yet I'll be the first to admit he's got some really bad taste in women. If you are going to cheat on your wife, at least do it with someone hot. You're the President, for goodness sake!

An interesting read. I wonder how long it's going to take for someone with a grudge against Obama to remember some suspicions and innuendo from 9 years ago. I think publishing this story sets a bad precedent no matter what candiddate you are voting for.

I'm sure the Republicans have been looking for dirt on Obama for months. The McCain story is interesting not because of the rumor of an affair, but because he seems to have intervened on her behalf in the Senate inappropriately in at least one case. According to the TNR article, the Times got the tip in November, so it's not as though they've been waiting around since 1999 to publish this.

The real negative precedents have been set by Republican operatives who sell bullshit to the credulous news media. McCain was a victim of Rove's tactics in South Carolina in 2000, and John Kerry was a victim of it in 2004. Unlike those, this is actual news with, you know, verifiable details.

I'm sure the Republicans have been looking for dirt on Obama for months.

Why "the Republicans" on Obama but The New York Times on McCain? Could it be possible that a conservative publication could run with a questionable story on Obama just as the NYT ran with this one on McCain?

Quote from: Brendan on February 21, 2008, 07:42:17 PM

The real negative precedents have been set by Republican operatives who sell bullshit to the credulous news media. McCain was a victim of Rove's tactics in South Carolina in 2000, and John Kerry was a victim of it in 2004. Unlike those, this is actual news with, you know, verifiable details.

The only questionable assertion in this story is whether or not there was an affair; clearly the editorial staff thought there was enough to go forward with, and I presume that it was delayed since December because of the lawyering.

Here's the verifiable inappropriate letter that McCain wrote to the FCC and the response of the commissioner:

The Times reported that Iseman helped to draft his letter; the McCain camp has not specifically denied that, only that no one from the lobbying firm "asked him" to write the letter. The group on behalf of him he intervened, Paxson Communications, had donated $20,000 to McCain. The end result of his letter was that the commission approved the deal 3-2.

There's a lot more details that'll come out in the next few weeks as other news sources investigate, I'm sure. This is not some hatchet job like SBVFT.

Now there appears to be some evidence of impropriety here and this is the way the Bill/Monica thing started to go public. But I hate to see dirty politics...I'd much rather see a cleaner race. I'm not overly excited that this has come out.

That being said, with the horrendous dirtball tactics that the Republican machine has been using over the last few years, a little payback isn't out of order. The Swift Boat attacks (yes, I know McCain denounced them) on Kerry were entirely fabricated and the vast majority of Republicans were silent or even gloated all while knowing the attacks were wrong. Same thing when Vince Foster killed himself, when the not-so-silent whispers of the Right Wing were implicating Bill with murder. I think the whole Bill/Monica thing was out-of-bounds...after all, how does a RNC zealot get permission to go from investigating improper financial transactions to investigating adultry and sexual harassment lawsuits?

As such, while I detest these tactics, it may be that Dems have started fighting fire with fire. Of course, they already tried once (Dan Rather), but that didn't go too well.

To me this seems to be as much of a hatchet job as the Swift Boat business so far.

Except this job is being done by a "creditable" news source.

The possibility of an affair is irrelevant. The behavior on behalf of the lobbyist who gave him 20k in cash is relevant.

But the article is about an affair. Perception is reality. The pubic is being told that there was an affair between McCain and this woman. If they have proof of impropriety regarding FAA permits they should have written the article about that. That kind of thing doesn't get headlines like an extramarital affair though. My 11 o:clock news lead was all about "John McCain's affair with a young lobbyist." Not a letter being written to the FCC 8 years ago. Do you really not see the distinction?

The end result of his letter was that the commission approved the deal 3-2.

That's just a wee bit of a stretch.

Obviously you can't draw a direct causal connection.

Here are the facts:

McCain had, at least, a friendship with a lobbyist. The clients of that lobbyist donated over $20,000 to McCain's campaigns. They wanted to acquire a Pittsburgh television station. The deal had been under consideration for two years. He sent a letter that the chairman of the FCC wrote a public response to. That response said, in effect, that it was "highly unusual" for McCain to ask them to announce their voting status and that it could have "procedural and substantive impacts on the commission's deliberations." The WaPo reported in 2000 that "As for the Paxson letter, McCain's aides confirmed that he had written the missive at the request of Alcalde & Fay, the Washington lobbying firm retained by Paxson." The commission made a decision just several days later in a narrow victory for McCain's lobbyist friend.

To me this seems to be as much of a hatchet job as the Swift Boat business so far.

Except this job is being done by a "creditable" news source.

The possibility of an affair is irrelevant. The behavior on behalf of the lobbyist who gave him 20k in cash is relevant.

And yet the possibility of the affair is used as the hook and lede for the article.

I don't think they should've used that in the piece - they didn't need to. Regardless, they're attempting to make a broad point with the article: that despite his self-professed reputation as an ethics-in-politics crusader, he's oblivious to his own conflicts of interest, even to the extent that his aides were concerned about how his "close friendship" with the lobbyist would look.

There's plenty of detail in the piece that stands on its own. I mean, McCain's gotten a free pass from the media for a decade. He was a member of the Keating 5. He cheated on his first wife, dumping her for an heiress that financed his first run for the senate. In just the last week, he's been accusing Obama of ducking some purported assurance that Obama would use public financing even while attempting to avoid problems with the FEC for making assurances that he'd use public money to repay a private bank loan.

The end result of all this will just be that Republicans will give him more money because they love to hate the New York Times.

It clearly wasn't a stretch for the people involved in the deliberations. I am not privvy to the internal machinations of how these decisions get made, and what external pressure does. With respect to the "sniff test", when a decision that's stretched on for 800 days finally takes place in a very close vote just days after a United States senator writes a letter admonishing them to make a decision, and when it's well known who that senator favors, I'm saying it might be a duck.

An interesting take on the NYT. Not just about the McCain story. But on the Clintons and Obama as well.

Quote

Every now and then, the New York Times writes a story that requires Cliffs Notes. It is a story that doesn't exactly say what it is saying, or only says part of what the reporters seem to believe, or seems to be saying something it is not, or something like that. No doubt the story is beautifully written and edited, but one can read the thing three or four times and still not entirely be sure what is going on.

Do you have an actual reputable source for this smear? Or is Drudge the best you can do?

Isn't it kind of ironic how Drudge was reputable when he was "breaking news" on Clinton and Lewinski (or Kerry and whatever that fabricated story was)... and yet he's not reputable when his target is McCain?

Do you have an actual reputable source for this smear? Or is Drudge the best you can do?

You might want to know what Drudge Report is before you attack the link. The site just links to other web pages 99.9% of the time, and usually big name sites. In that case it was the NY Times article. Typical uneducated Brett post though.

Do you have an actual reputable source for this smear? Or is Drudge the best you can do?

Isn't it kind of ironic how Drudge was reputable when he was "breaking news" on Clinton and Lewinski (or Kerry and whatever that fabricated story was)... and yet he's not reputable when his target is McCain?

What a boring debate last night. There really doesn't seem to be that much difference in their positions. I think Obama just comes accross better and seems less polarizing. I am going to try to score tickets to the Cleveland State debate next week.